Thermal Performance of Heat Exchanger Using Zeolite/vapour Adsorption

Abstract

About 60% of the energy input in the chemical industry is discarded from the plant. Energy saving can be achieved in the entire plant by recovering these waste heats and reusing them as power and heat sources in the power plant. An adsorption heat pump has been developed for the purpose of regeneration of such unused energy. In this study, saturated humid air was supplied to a device packed with 13X zeolite particles of 4 mm in diameter. The time variation of temperature in the apparatus was measured experimentally. Then, the maximum temperature was estimated from the relationship between heat balance and adsorption equilibrium. The trend of the maximum temperature calculated from the heat balance is consistent with experiment. Further, it was found from the result of the heat balance equation that the sensible heat of the humid air supplied and the heat of adsorption of the zeolite are mainly distributed to the sensible heat of the zeolite. In the future, it is important to make effective use of the sensible heat of this zeolite. In order to extract more thermal energy from the device, it is necessary to improve the heat transfer between the packed bed and medium. A double pipe heat exchanger having a zeolite packed bed on the annular side was proposed as an apparatus. Flow direction of the humid air supplied to device was changed in two different ways. The one of them is supplying humid air radial flowly to the device and another is supplying the air in parallel flow. The influence of flow direction on heat transfer between packed bed and medium is studied with numerical simulation.